Creating a unique, non-rock-tour look for one of music’s most distinctive acts
By David Barbour

Genesis is the perfect name for a group that has reinvented itself endlessly over the course of four decades. With its revolving cast of personnel, changing musical styles, and remarkable staying power, it has become one of rock’s great shape-shifters, constantly re-accommodating itself to the times.

That’s exactly what the group did this summer, as it reunited for the Turn It On Again Tour, which brought together three prominent Genesis alumni—Phil Collins, Tony Banks, and Mike Rutherford—for a production that was a perfect fit for this era of touring spectacles. The redoubtable team of Mark Fisher and Patrick Woodroffe once again put together a visual production, for both stadiums and arenas, which was both visually astonishing, yet elegantly free of clutter, while the front-of-house engineer, Michel Collin, maintained high sonic values throughout.

Fisher’s scenic conception looked like the skeleton of some giant sea animal stretching up into the air; much of the surface was covered in LEDs, displaying the kind of trippy imagery that one would associate with the group. Fisher set’s contained plenty of unusual angles for Woodroffe to bathe the stage in energizing cues that featured some startling color combinations. It was an evening of pure sensory stimulation, accompanying a much-loved band’s long-awaited return.

“The biggest challenge was they have a fantastic precedent of putting on amazing shows,” says Woodroffe. “We wanted to do something that was as good as what they had done before.” The result was a design that looked nothing anyone has seen before.

Out of the shell
Fisher says he sketched a number of possible scenic ideas at the beginning of the design process. “One idea that resonated was loosely based on a conch shell, with the spines raising up the back, on which were moving lights,” he says.” That’s what we developed into what we had on the road. At the beginning, Patrick came up with a sketch that had lighting masts placed behind the band, with lights that could move up and down.” At the same time, he says, the three band members provided their commentary. “It became clear that what they really wanted was something that didn’t look rock ‘n roll, rather something softer and more organic.”

The resulting design, says Woodroofe, was “a very elegant, modern shape filled with video and lighting.” Interestingly, in spite of the set’s vast dimensions, Woodroffe notes, “Mark’s idea was to put the band on a very small playing area.” He adds, laughing, “When the production team got to rehearsals, we had a frisson of panic and briefly tried to make it bigger—but it subsided when the band got onstage and fell in love with the layout. It gave the show a real heart and focus. When you’re putting on a big spectacle, it has to seem to emanate from the band. By making the playing area a small space, Mark forced that issue.”

The stage for the tour did indeed place the band downstage center, in a relatively limited playing area, but it was expansive in other ways: the area underneath the stage provided ample room for the band’s technicians to operate. It was also tailored for easy assembly: Each section of the stage was built on casters, so it could be assembled, with equipment, away from the main build, then pushed into place. Behind the band stood seven truss arms on which were placed lighting units; the arms were linked by sections of fabric, which protected the musicians from rain during outdoor performances. Further upstage was an enormous video wall, which ended, at both left and right, in oval-shaped IMAG screens. Extending above the video was another set of much larger trusses, on which light pods moved up and down.

The set was built in the U.K. by Brilliant Stages. The video wall was constructed from custom-built aluminum panels, which were designed to load quickly and safely out of their transit carts and to slide onto vertical tracks. Each panel was 2m tall and linked the panel below; the tallest column in the structure weighted approximately two tons. The wall’s top panels followed the contour of the “brow,” a structure that housed custom profile steel frames; the latter had three uses—1) to act as the main lifting beam for the column, 2) provide a place to mount moving lights, 3) support the brow’s aluminum fascia.

The seven rib towers upstage of the screen were supplied by StageCo; each rib took one moving light pod, which were built around a single Zap Lighting BigLite unit (distributed in the U.S. by Martin Professional). Two BigLites were suspended below each pod, with a custom 12-way PAR 64 blinder and four Martin Atomic strobes placed above it. Kinesys, the automation specialist, supplied seven G2 winches, custom-designed by Mark Barnett, to move the lighting pods along the rigs. The ribs varied in height, from 20-27m, and followed an asymmetric curve along the 55m wide brow. The G2 winches could lift 800kg at 1m a second; as controlled by 11kW Velocity drives, they were run at 800mm per second. The pods were also wired for pyro, used during the number “Invisible Touch.”

Atttached to the sides of each rib tower were two tracks from Harken, a supplier of specialist yachting hardware. The first track accepted a short cantilevered arm for carrying the moving lights to their position on the side of the ribs; the second was used to to guide the cargo nets that linked the ribs. Each net had silver PVC diamond mesh on its downstage face, with applied black Soltis on the upstage side; in addition, 600 random strobes were wired into the fabric. The PA’s headers curved around the PA rigging beams, hooking on to a custom Tomcat truss, with eight-way Molefays penetrating through the aluminum cladding. Kinesys also supplied 15 Lifket 250kg, 30m/minute chain hoists, controlled by Elevation 1+ variable speed hoist controllers, to lift the cargo nets; these were run off the same Vector control system as the winches.

The main video screen, which was designed by Fisher, consisted of 15,089 Barco 510 O-Lite panels with 270 control boxes, supplied by XL Video (via the rental house Blink TV. The O-Lite screen was 13m high by 55m wide; the O-Lite pixels were fitted into touring frames designed by Jeremy Lloyd of Stufish, Fisher’s design firm, and made by Brilliant Stages. “Jeremy’s design worked out all the details regarding construction, fast assembly, wind-bracing, rigging, and packaging,” says Fisher. Bookending the Barco screen were two Mitsubishi16:8 high-resolution screens (employing 102 panels). The Barco screen handled a mix of IMAG and created content; the Mitsubishi screens handled IMAG.

Fisher says that the Barco screen featured different pixel pitches, to create four different resolutions. “Off to the left [on the Mitsubishi ovals], it was all high-res,” he says. “Behind the band, there was a surface that was 85% solid LED; to the sides and below, it was 65% solid; connecting the middle and the high-res, there was an area that was at 50%. These varying densities of LED surface allowed us to create a huge screen economically. It would have been astronomically expensive otherwise. Also, with this format, you could get all sorts of interesting effects.”

Speaking of the lighting units placed along the brow at the top of the LED screen, Fisher says, “These big instruments can be a nightmare to put into position—so the truss incorporate horizontal mounting brackets; as part of Jeremy’s design, they were hinged and were load-bearing, so you could put the light on the bracket in its normal orientation, get it clamped, then flipped correctly into place. It sat in the truss itself, so only the moving head stuck out and the fascia hid the rest.”

The aluminum truss was made up of 11 unique sections that, when pinned together, followed the compound curve of the existing system. Each second had a two-ton rigging point that was used to raise the section via chain hoists. The top steel panels attached to the downstage side the truss. To raise each video column, two 1-ton hoists were mounted permanently into each section of truss and the chains were reeved over diverter pulleys to maximize their travel. To streamline the assembly, each truss had its own casters, which allowed them to be wheeled straight from the truck and into position, ready to be rigged. To compress the width of the screen for arenas, Brilliant Stages built two offstage vertical legs of aluminum truss, which allowed for the attachment of moving the moving lights and additional brow fascia.

For smaller arena shows, says Fisher, “The shape of the fascia and the O-Lite screen changed; the fascia had to be strengthened, because the rigging system changed from being ground-supported to flown. Jeremy designed an additional truss, plus other bits and pieces to make all this possible. He also designed the new sections that finished off the stage-left and stage-right ends of the screen.”

Also for stadiums, Lloyd designed  two high-res rear projection screens that were 8.4 high and 5.4m wide, and made from two aluminum rolled ladder beams. The front ladder accepted a brushed aluminum fascia matching the brow and the projection screen, which was attached using bungies stretched behind the fascia. The rear ladder was set 2m upstage of the front ladder, allowing a blackout cloth to be attached around the screen, to eliminated light spillage from other sources. A set of seven “roofette’” ribs were employed; they were lightweight, non-structural copies of the stadium ribs, each made in three sections in an assembly of mechanically fixed aluminum profiled plates, and finished with a powder coat of grey. The ribs had moving lights mounted to their underside and tips. Each rib was connected to the mother grid via two chain hoists.

Probably the biggest complication for Fisher was the tour’s ambitious performance schedule. “We did four nights of back-to-back performances in Europe,” he says. “That meant the integration of leapfrogging systems of steel and production that became more complicated and multi-layered.” Using this method, he adds, “When the production arrived onsite, all the high steel was in place. That included the big masts that the lights traveled on and a series of masts that supported the screens. Then header truss was put into place and the video panels were clipped on underneath and lifted onto the rigging that was already in place. We got the installation down to three or four hours. There was almost no climbing required, which made everything faster and a lot safer.”

Indeed the tour required five steel crews, two advance system, 90 trucks, and more than 250 crew members. All this complexity went towards a design that was both stunning and simple. There were no gags, no odd effects. “In the end, it was just a very cool stage,” says Fisher. “There were no gimmicks, apart from the big video wall and the moving lights. Everything was delivered in a very cool way.”
Lighting and Sound America © David Barbour 2007